There are exceptions, naturally, and last year as it happened the standout offerings bucked this particular trend. Stand Up And Fight, Last Man Standing and Hurling: The Revolution Years were celebrations, hosannas to heroics shot through by use of anecdote and banter. This year, though, the majority of the books most worth spending time/money/gift vouchers on take us to those places we just about don't mind visiting this one time, places we thank our lucky stars we don't have to live in. In a field of countless runners, 10 stand beyond the rest in the market.

The Best Bleakest and best is, of course, Back From The Brink (Century, 28.85), the tortuous story of Paul McGrath's life as told to Vincent Hogan.

By pretty much any yardstick, there hasn't been a sports book to touch this one in years.

Tony Adams' Addicted covered similar ground and covered it well but comparing the two is like saying that Phil Babb had a decent game in the Giants' Stadium in 1994. He had, but we're talking fillet and striploin here.

If right was right . . . which it isn't, of course, but a lad can dream . . . every Ashley Cole who was ever convinced by his agent that he had a book in him would be made sit in a locked room and read Back From The Brink right to the last page. If, after that, he still thought his story was worth the chopped down tree, then fine. All we're after is some truth, a bit of humanity, a hint of a story.

McGrath's bar couldn't be set any higher on any of those three counts. If anything, there's almost too much truth. Because there are passages here that will make you wince, others that will bring a tear, still others that will have you thinking sadly of the friend or relative or acquaintance laid low by alcoholism.

The honesty is crushing and coruscating, the story compelling throughout.

If it is the benchmark for books on lives strangled with alcohol addiction, then Riding The Storm (Highdown, 24.99), Timmy Murphy's account, with Donn McLean, of his fall and rise through the slough of drink is one that bears comparison. Again, the standout trait is the honesty, the sense that what you're reading isn't some carefully spun defence of Murphy's actions but instead an attempt at an explanation of what it was that led his life where it went.

Death On A Country Road (Mercier, 11.95) by Desmond Fahy doesn't exactly carry the most enticing of titles on its back but it certainly can't be accused of trying to mislead. It's the exhaustively-researched story of Sean Farmer and Colm McCartney, an Armagh man and a Derryman who were murdered on their way back from the Dublin v Derry All Ireland semi-final of 1975, lured to their death by a bogus security check-point near Keady in South Armagh. Fahy, author of the excellent How The GAA Survived The Troubles a few years back, tells the story of their lives, deaths and the aftermath with gimlet precision and genuine warmth. It's neither sexy nor Christmassy but it brings honesty in its search for justice, its search for truth. A truly great sports book.

We're in danger of getting bogged down in misery here so maybe it's best to turn to the funniest of the reads to pass in front of these eyes all year. There's heartache to be found even here, however, in that our author dies of cancer in the end. But make no mistake, Penguins Stopped Play (Hodder, 17.95) by Harry Thompson, has the most laughs per page of anything on offer.

Thompson was a television producer, the man who invented both Have I Got News For Yo u and Never Mind The Buzzcocks, and each paragraph here carries all the sarcasm and wit that has sustained those two shows for so long. Ostensibly the story of how his village cricket team managed to play matches on all seven continents over the space of 20-odd years, it's as much a wry rumination on the madness of men and mates and their sport as anything else.

If you went looking for a life into which there's been a higher than average rainfall, John Daly's mightn't be a bad place to start.

Another who's seen everything and nothing through the bottom of a bottle . . . with the added twist of a jaw-dropping capacity to enrich casino owners . . . Daly has emerged the other side with as warm a memoir as you're likely to come across from a top sportsman.

My Life In And Out Of The Rough (Harper Sport, 24.99) with Glen Waggoner is completely absurd at times . . . the chapter on his four wives has to be read at least twice, the second time to catch up on what you missed through laughter in the first go . . . but no less enjoyable for that. It's impossible to come away from it not loving the guy.

Books are books are books and it always seems just a little hilarious when somebody describes a sports book as being 'important'.

(Someone once said that about Tony Cascarino's autobiography, only to be met with the damning comeback, "Important? You mean like The Bible?"). But if one book this year deserves to be thought of as such, it's the magnificent Game Of Shadows (Gotham, 22.50) by Lance Williams and Mark FainaruWada. Williams and Fainaru-Wada broke the Balco steroid story in the San Francisco Chronicle and have followed every thread of it to its conclusion. It now looks like they'll have to do more jail time than anyone involved in the trial they helped bring about for refusal to reveal their sources. Sports journalism to make the rest of us ashamed of ourselves.

But enough of the slough of despond. Lest you start thinking this piece should be read with something by My Chemical Romance soundtracking it, there have been good books this year that accentuated the hell out of the positive. First among them is the latest in Tom Humphries' ever-lengthening line of classics, Dublin v Kerry (Penguin, 27.00). In a Paul McGrath-less year, this would be the towering standout and it's certainly the much more enjoyable read of the two. That isn't to say it's fluff . . . not remotely. It just doesn't come laden with the relentless misery the Back from The Brink does.

What it does come with is Humphries' palpable fascination with the mystique surrounding the Dublin/Kerry rivalry of latter half of the '70s. In searching for the yarns of the time, he seeks not to puncture that mystique, only to flesh it out. The approach works in every way. Nobody writes about sport better than he does and if the Gaelic football-watchers of the mid- to late-'70s were blessed to have the likes of Mullins and Hickey and Mikey and Jacko, well, readers of sport in Ireland over the past decade can feel no less lucky to have had this man and his laptop to serve them.

For some, one of the few practitioners in Humphries' league is Simon Barnes, the chief sportswriter for The Times in London. For others, a vigorous eye-scraping with a freshly-tarred dessert spoon followed by a brisk bounce on a barbed-wire trampoline would be preferable to sitting through one of his pieces.

Your enjoyment of Barnes' The Meaning Of Sport (Short Books, 25.50) will be governed by the camp in which you place yourself. As a paid-up member of the former one, the verdict here is resolutely and defiantly positive.

The final two at the highest end of the scale this year concern a pair of achievements which for very different reasons were scarcely believable. The first is Munster: Our Road To Glory (Penguin, 27.50) by Alan English and the Munster team. Nobody's words hold more fascination than those of the players themselves and English has done a masterful job in extracting them here. And Little Lady, One Man, Big Ocean (Collins Press, 14.99) by Paul Gleeson and Tori Holmes with Liam Gorman wraps words around the almost incomprehensible task of rowing across the Atlantic and does so with an entertaining eye for detail and quirk.

The Rest For once, soccer hasn't been terribly served this year. If you forget the various efforts of Mssrs Cole, Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard . . .

and fear not, you will . . . some of the crop on offer is actually fairly presentable. The Thinking Fan's Guide To The World Cup (Abacus, 12.95), edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey is well worth the read, despite its dreadfully snooty title. Splicing football, politics, culture and wit is plate-spinning indeed but most of the various authors here . . . the likes of Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers, Tim Adams and Tim Parks . . . manage it. Not every one of the 32 pieces is exceptional but then neither was every team at the World Cup.

Forza Italia (Ebury, 13.95) by Paddy Agnew is an eye-opening journey through two decades of one of the maddest football nations on the planet and is much more enjoyable that the rather scholarly Calcio (Fourth Estate, 19.50) by John Foot. The big problem with both of them is that they don't deal with the 12 months just gone, the craziest of all years in Italian football history.

The Perfect 10 (Faber and Faber, 18.95) by Richard Williams is a study of 10 of the best number 10s in soccer history, from Puskas to Zidane via Pele, Platini and Maradona. For a book that deals with the wonder of the off-thecuff genius of these players, it's a little stuffy in places. Who Stole Our Game? (Gill & Macmillan, 14.99) by Daire Whelan is a brilliantly-researched treatment of the state of the game in this nation for which a generation of soccer writers will be forever thankful. And if you really want some insight into a life lived in English football, go for We All Live In A Perry Groves World (Blake, 22.00) by Perry Groves and John McShane, by turns amusing and bewildering but above all, honest.

The GAA cupboard is pretty bare this year, truth be told. Still, joy and wisdom can be found in the unlikeliest of places and so it is to a bend in the road on the border between Cork and Limerick that we turn for Diarmuid O'Flynn's Club, Sweat and Tears (Collins, 14.95). The story of Newtowshandrum's rise to national glory is wonderfully-realised and an unexpected pleasure. The Will To Win (O'Brien, 22.00) by Sean Boylan and John Quinn is a pretty straightforward account of how the Meath legend went about winning and put up with losing down the years. And Cuchulainn's Son (Blackwater Press, 13.95) by Tom Williams is an interesting and long overdue biography of Nicky Rackard.

As far as rugby goes, Edward Newman's Lansdowne Through The Years (Hodder, 25.50) takes us along the path of the final decades of the old kip through a series of interviews with the players who played there.

Great and not-so-great events are detailed, the pace is light, the stories informative and the photographs beautiful.

To golf and two of the slightly obscene multitude of Ryder Cup books out there. Heroes All (Hodder, 25.50), Darren Clarke's account both of what brought him to the decision to play in the Ryder Cup and of the subsequent weekend of emotion is moving while Philip Reid's The Cup (Maverick House, 14.99) is atmospheric and utterly comprehensive, a fine achievement for a tournament that feels like it only finished five minutes ago.

A couple of cricket books are guaranteed to raise a smile. Ireland's 100 Cricket Greats (Nonsuch, 16.99) by Gerard Siggins and James Fitzgerald contains biographies on the best, well, you can take a guess at what it contains, can't you? Their selection will cause controversy, especially with their pick of a 'first XI' to represent Ireland. Among those featured are Ed Joyce, Jeremy Bray, Alec O'Riordan, Dermott Monteith, Niall O'Brien, Alan Lewis and Jimmy Boucher. Also worth a look is Arm-ball to Zooter: A Sideways Look at the Language of Cricket (Penguin, 15.95) by Lawrence Booth.

Bits and bobs, then. Unforgivable Blackness (Pimlico, 13.95) by Geoffrey C Ward won the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year in England last month and stands comfortably alongside the past winners of that award.

Ronnie Delany's Staying The Distance, (O'Brien, 17.99) is a collection of his old articles from The Damned United (Faber and Faber, 14.95) by David Peace is the most bewildering and bewitching sports novel you'll ever read.

And finally, as ever, The Best American Sportswriting 2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 15.95), edited by Michael Lewis . . . he of Moneyball fame . . . is another engrossing edition of the finest series around. This year's featured pieces include sports as varied as pool, poker, cheerleading, poaching, rodeo, baseball and wrestling. The wrestling piece is particularly incredible, telling as it does the story of Kyle Maynard, a high school grappling star from Suwanee, Georgia who makes the state finals despite being born with no arms and no legs.

No kidding.

SOME WE MADE EARLIER. . .

Tough-toiling lot that we are here at Tribune Towers, two of our number have found the time to squeeze out even more words than the rest of us this year.

Every Single Ball by Brian Corcoran and Kieran Shannon (Mainstream, /13.95) is an autobiography in two parts, one detailing the Cork legend's career up to 2005 and the other a diary of this, his final year. Corcoran's is clearly an intelligent and searching mind and in his ghost-writer he has found a kindred spirit. The book is a credit to them both even if it has caused a bit of a stir in Waterford.

Beyond Our Wildest Dreams by Ciaran Cronin (Tautha na Mumhan Books, /23.95) is a painstakingly researched account of the 10 years of Munster involvement in the Heineken Cup, culminating in that day of days in Cardiff in May. Extensive interviews and a fine eye for anecdote abound.